12 ms·

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

375 points by aghuang 5mo ago

https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/dropbox-leadership-update https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/dropbox-leadership-u... https://twitter.com/drewhouston/status/2059275240065425474?s=20 https://twitter.com/drewhouston/status/2059275240065425474?s...

tuananh 5mo ago
if you're looking to get your data out of dropbox, rclone is godsend. it's very good + super fast.
georgel 5mo ago
The circle is complete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- pikseladam 5mo ago
  i didn't expect to laugh when i enter news today :)
  - ignoramous 5mo ago
    Daniel Gackle thinks BrandonM's is most probably the most misunderstood comment in news.yc history. from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281 Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years. I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here. When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is. The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea. * described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275 More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20brandonm&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - simoncion 5mo ago
      > People forget that this is a real person. Relatedly, people tend to forget that people who are fully aware that a real person has written a foolish and/or shortsighted comment will direct criticism at said comment. I understand that there exist people who -to oversimplify- have as their creed "Thou shall not directly say anything negative about anyone ever."... but that's a minority of people. That "soft pedal" stuff doesn't work for a notable subset of people, and -for some- generates _way_ more anxiety and stress than a frank and earnest discussion about just how stupid the stupid thing you just did is. [0] I get that some folks are Care Bears (affectionate, non-derogatory), but not only is that not the only way to be, folks who are like that freak out a not-insignificant subset of the population. > When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. Perhaps. But it looks to me like an eighth or so of the top-level commenters on the OP are talking as if the thing under discussion is application software. Maybe folks consistently abbreviated "YCombinator Funding Application" as "App" and "application software" as "application" at the time, but -if so- that's not made clear to me by reading the commentary. [0] I'd also object to any characterization that BrandonM's commentary is nitpicking in any regard. Unless you know someone pretty well, you have no idea what their background is, how careful they are, or how diligently they keep their appointments with the rubber duck. Anyone who has been in this business for five, ten+ years has seen people put a lot of work into something, but fail to understand or uncover one or more basic truths that invalidate all the work they've done. Basic sanity checks are useful.
- sillysaurusx 5mo ago
  I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature. Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing). In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files, since visiting an html page in a browser serves that file and relative links are preserved. I guess it's a losing value proposition, but it sure would be nice. It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.
  - jeffbee 5mo ago
    > right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item You have described Google Drive.
    - sillysaurusx 5mo ago
      Not quite; it's not a direct link to the item. Put <img src="foo.jpg"> into an html file, alongside foo.jpg. In the original Dropbox, if you opened a link to the html file, you'd see a webpage that successfully rendered foo.jpg. So you could use it as a static file host.
      - georgel 5mo ago
        It was such a nice feature too, but very easily and quickly abused.
  - tyler71 5mo ago
    pcloud with the public folder works well. I've uploaded a few html ebooks with relative routing and it has worked fine.
    - sillysaurusx 5mo ago
      Where's the public folder? I tried uploading an html file but can't get a direct link to it: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ6NzI5ZoJ0CG3nPXqBFrHeL4gaezYprgxjV https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ6NzI5ZoJ0CG3nPXqBF...
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  It is a darn shame, if the major OS providers didn't roll their own cloud storage, Dropbox could have been the default go-to across the board, and any other competitors that would have risen.
  - ADent 5mo ago
    They were seemingly everywhere and lots of apps and services offered Dropbox as an option. 200 million users in 2013. Then they crippled the free plan and Apple and MS started pushing their services hard. And Dropbox seemed less ubiquitous after that.
    - giancarlostoro 5mo ago
      I remember even Ubuntu had their own storage offering, which had they kept it going, I might have subscribed to to this day. Shame, would have been an easy way for Ubuntu to fund itself.
- 1970-01-01 5mo ago
  It was quite a stupid and expensive ride, but they were vindicated, especially on point 3: >Our business is in a stronger position than it's been in years >What’s energized me most since joining Dropbox is the connection people have with our brand >It gives me a lot of confidence in what’s ahead for Dropbox All corporate fluff, no actual content.
  - urams 5mo ago
    Point 3 was not "'viral' or income generating" and DBX pioneered one of the most viral campaigns (give-get) and generates almost $1B a year in free cash flows? How is that vindication?
    - 1970-01-01 5mo ago
      Their roadmap doesn't exist beyond their one-hit-wonder. CEOs are stepping down because there is no future for the company unless you count acquisition by Amazon or Google or Apple, which will result in the entire company being walked to the grave.
      - urams 5mo ago
        This is really a non-answer. If your point is "Dropbox is a struggling company and therefore all criticism of it ever is fully validated no matter the timeline" then any criticism of any company ever will be validated eventually which is absurd.
- arealaccount 5mo ago
  Man HN was a different place back then. People sharing ideas and getting constructive (even if comically wrong) feedback. It reads more like founders and hackers helping each other. The discussions lately are more like folks armchair analyzing or speculating companies that are already incumbent tech giants. Or maybe I just click those headlines at a higher rate..
  - brittlepeanut 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - supern0va 5mo ago
      And yet, it somehow has significantly better conversations than most places online. Maybe on par with reddit 10-15 years ago. It's frankly depressing how few places there are to have quality conversations, particularly for general tech.
      - ricardobayes 5mo ago
        Yes, although unfortunately the only problem with it, there's no way to contribute to older topics in a meaningful way. Due to the nature of this format not even the original author checks old comments and absolutely no chance any new conversation sparks out of it.
        supern0va 5mo ago
        >Due to the nature of this format not even the original author checks old comments and absolutely no chance any new conversation sparks out of it. Sometimes I wonder if the format actually helps. I suspect that when you know you can pretend you didn't see a reply to your comment, you feel less likely to need to defend yourself when you realize you might be wrong. You can just close the tab and, since there was no notification, just move on without the ego hit.
      - jsbisviewtiful 5mo ago
- CSMastermind 5mo ago
  Wow cool to see.
gigatree 5mo ago
Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs
- jedberg 5mo ago
  For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Edit: Read the comment below, it's information I should have included in the first place. It's important to note that the comment was helpful at the time, and only became a meme later.
  - sillysaurusx 5mo ago
    > Most people I know e-mail files to themselves It would be nice if that still worked. My resume exists in an iCloud drive, and I spent ten minutes on my phone trying to figure out how to attach it to a gmail message before giving up. "Copying" a file isn't even a well-defined operation anymore. (Or at least "pasting" doesn't always paste it.)
    - genxy 5mo ago
      When you get stuck in a task like this, you realize that civilization will collapse with a whimper.
    - dghlsakjg 5mo ago
      It’s literally: click the paper clip logo in Gmail, tap files, pick your file. You can also just go into the files app, tap and hold, tap copy, go to Gmail tap and hold in your draft email, tap paste. There’s other paths that work too, like hitting the “send to” logo in files and then selecting Gmail. It’s really the exact same patterns I might use on a computer for the most part.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - matsemann 5mo ago
browningstreet 5mo ago
Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Being able to set local and not-local flags on files/folders is great. I spent some time trying to use a few of their alternatives, plus their mobile client apps, and it's kinda just Dropbox still.
- 1970-01-01 5mo ago
  You could just put it on a local disk? 512GB sdcard is like $15 at Walmart.
  - dghlsakjg 5mo ago
    Check the price of flash memory again. That $15 card is almost certainly a scam.
    - dawnerd 5mo ago
      Yeah their memory of how much memory costs is outdated. I was just at a walmart this weekend and a 128 card was 30 bucks.
    - matsemann 5mo ago
      At least if bought from Amazon. It will happily accept writing 512 GB to it, but it's not stored anywhere.
      - irishcoffee 5mo ago
        Yep that burned me once. Lesson learned.
  - browningstreet 5mo ago
    I wanted a forever backup. I'm going to trust Apple and a hard drive.
sidcool 5mo ago
Is he the next Member of Technical staff at Anthropic?
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
  No, that's Pope Leo.
wwweston 5mo ago
Really hope that all the positives in the leadership announcement are true. Things have reached the point where I probably could use open sync+storage options to achieve what I do with Dropbox (and perhaps eventually I will do that as a hedge against the risks of Dropbox enshitification). But I'd love to see Dropbox continue to provide worthy convenient service.
vednig 5mo ago
I wish Drew all the best for his journey, he built the market for many generations to come.
postalcoder 5mo ago
I think I've spent more on dropbox, lifetime, than most other subscriptions (it's also the first service i thought was worth paying a subscription for). I still pay for it. Drew built a great service. On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. All I care about is packrat and good syncing. Is there anybody that loves anything they've built in the last fifteen years? I feel like the company could have had a skeleton crew keeping the lights on and I wouldn't have noticed a thing. Now, in 2026, all I want is for my coding agent to be able to grep the files in dropbox. Feel like dropbox will sooner rely on selling merch than offer something useful like that, though.
- microtonal 5mo ago
  All I care about is packrat and good syncing. For me that and end-to-end encryption (I know it's supported for teams now). Instead they just added more annoyances over time. Every time I logged into the web interface, I would get stupid upselling advertisements (maybe don't badger your paying users with that nonsense)? I replaced the official client by Maestral years ago, because they switched to embedding a web browser, and the AFAIR the client was also trying to do upsells. My wife were and I were customers for years. But we finally decided to terminate our subscription last year. Mostly because of the constant upgrade nagging + the orange guy taking office and Dropbox not providing E2E encryption on family accounts. So we switched to Proton Drive. It's worse in many ways, but at least it's E2E encrypted and doesn't shove upgrading ads in our faces all the time. It's sad, Dropbox was really a great product.
  - plasticsoprano 5mo ago
    E2E is supported for specific types of folders available only to teams but the admin has to enable it and that folder has to be used. You can't apply it team wide to all users. It's a very poor implementation.
    - insanitybit 5mo ago
      If you want E2E, encrypt your data yourself. By far the simplest, safest solution to the problem.
hylaride 5mo ago
Dropbox was an excellent service back in the day. Then they re-wrote their desktop apps (I think in python?) and it never synced cleanly after that. I'm all-in on the apple ecosystem, so while it's not perfect, iCloud storage works better. Was a shame, though.
- jeffbee 5mo ago
  The biggest lesson I learned working at Dropbox was how toxic python is. If you have an unmanageable python code base, and hire Guido himself to help you fix it, he'll dig you into an even deeper hole and then quit. Which honestly was an extension of my experience at Google. When I left Google for Dropbox, python at Google was also in crisis. These two companies cemented my "python: not even once" stance.
  - varun_ch 5mo ago
    TIL the creator of Python worked at Dropbox for 6 years.
  - DoctorDabadedoo 5mo ago
    I would say that in general dynamic type languages are problematic in a large codebase without strict safeguards (Any everywhere, untested paths, lack of test coverage, large methods with different return scopes, etc.). I've worked a long time in C++ land in large codebases and the issues there are different, but to undig a project from the spaguetti land is like pulling teeth.
- matsemann 5mo ago
  It was python from the start ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8892 ), but maybe the 2to3 migration, or just a general rewrite you're thinking of?
  - hylaride 5mo ago
    There was a "major" change in the agent roughly a decade ago. Dropbox went from being a simple folder sync tool to a much more bloated agent that never synced cleanly. I don't know if they just moved away from some modules that were written in C or something, but I gave up on it soon after.
ivraatiems 5mo ago
I think Dropbox is great, but I got about 10GB of storage via affiliate links ten years ago and I've never upgraded or paid a cent since. I'm sure I'm a huge loss for them. And even despite enjoying their service, if Google Drive produced a Windows integration that actually worked well, I'd leave for it in a minute. I'd never use OneDrive, but that's more out of spite at Microsoft shoving it at me than because it is bad in any way I know of clearly.
ecommerceguy 5mo ago
call me crazy im still using a 100gb box account from when i bought an hp touchpad. that thing was so cool.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
njt 5mo ago
I recently placed some PDF files for some nontechnical people on Dropbox. To avoid confusing them with the long complicated Dropbox URL, I even created a shortened link for them to use (think https://event.myorg.test https://event.myorg.test). Almost none of them had Dropbox accounts. I found out later from someone that 90% of them couldn’t access the files. The link didn’t require a login but they made it look to the unsophisticated observer that you need an account to get the files. So these folks (most of them were elderly), just gave up.
- aeyes 5mo ago
  But you don't need a Dropbox account to view any file for which you created a shareable link. If you add raw=1 to the URL then it will directly show in the browser without the Dropbox viewer. Or did you share a folder?
  - mystifyingpoi 5mo ago
    You don't need account, that's for sure, but multiple times I've seen a big upsell popup that suggests that account is required, while the tiny gray button "skip to files" is on the very bottom. I hate such patterns.
  - MaxL93 5mo ago
    It's maddening that they force you to tweak with the URLs just so you can feed people a link that works for them though
- restruxt 5mo ago
  The dark pattern nags to unregistered users for shared files are the number one reason I permanently abandoned Dropbox for personal and business use. It was subtle at first, then it got pathetically bad. When a company like Dropbox prioritizes user account growth over usability, that company debases itself and deserves to lose.
- afro88 5mo ago
  My elderly mother ended up with a Dropbox subscription because someone sent her a file on Dropbox, that she could technically access for free, but she got dark patterned into creating an account and subscribing. To a yearly plan no less
semiinfinitely 5mo ago
[flagged]
krashidov 5mo ago
I am surprised they aren't leaning into the agent dev tool mania right now. File syncing is actually very in demand right now and everyone is not doing a great job figuring it out.
arbirk 5mo ago
They focused on the wrong product imo. File sync as in syncing the files you are actively working on and temporary files like clipboard etc. is powerful. Syncing folders and doing backups is difficult and expensive. I am still looking for a good product that makes it easy to do all that.
unpopularopp 5mo ago
I wish they had a plan between free and 120€/year. I don't need 2TB storage but the free plan's 2GB is also nothing
zengid 5mo ago
Drew was CEO for almost 20 years right? that's a heck of a run!
farcaster 5mo ago
10 years ago they had such a nice feature of grabbing your pictures metadata and showing them on the globe (Immich does this too). And they just scrapped it for no reason. I guess they wanted to make dropbox into more of a collaborative google docs kind of thing. But that's not why I started paying for it.
jabedude 5mo ago
Why are the HN comments about how Dropbox's business is not doing well? I don't think there's any indication that Drew is stepping down because of that?
- toephu2 5mo ago
  Because there is PR speak, and then there is reality.
- layer8 5mo ago
  A change in long-standing leadership often signifies a change in strategy, whether warranted or not. It’s more likely to deteriorate than to improve the offering, especially given that Dropbox is largely a “finished” product.
  - jabedude 5mo ago
    That's relevant to the future prospects of the product, but most of the comments are bemoaning the current and previous state of Dropbox. Just seems unrelated to me
kasperset 5mo ago
One of my favorite product, it just works in the background. I do not need any more features than what it has currently. None of the competitors have this ability to just blend in the background. I hope they stay for a long time.
- layer8 5mo ago
  The one useful feature it still lacks is E2EE for non-team accounts. Though you can emulate that with third-party tools.
victorkulla 5mo ago
[flagged]
jaredcwhite 5mo ago
I've used and paid for Dropbox for well over a decade. Other than the rare hiccup every few years (usually due to switching machines/OSes or whatnot), it's been rock solid and a true workhorse. I know there are many other options, including iCloud Drive which I use sparingly, but Dropbox is a service I trust. I hope it continues in that manner and they don't destroy their reputation with a woebegone "pivot to AI".
toephu2 5mo ago
As Steve Jobs famously told Drew Houston..."you have a feature, not a product." Jobs was ultimately right in the end.
- convenwis 5mo ago
  He was right in a sense but $6b market cap is nothing to sneeze at.
- layer8 5mo ago
  I wouldn’t have a Dropbox subscription if it was merely a feature attached to some product. I have it because it’s an independent service.
- alexandre_m 5mo ago
  [flagged]
victorkulla 5mo ago
[flagged]
thm 5mo ago
So, Web 2.0 is finally over now?
bhouston 5mo ago
Dropbox's stock has been stuck at around $6B valuation for years with flat growth and income around $2.5B per year. It is just stuck. Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation. I think it is the market, not the leadership. It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive). Not sure where to go since the big guys won't acquire you given that they have alternatives. Maybe a business software acquirer like Salesforce or Dell? Or an AI company that would use this type of cloud storage as a AI document store / collaboration hub? I honestly do not know where to go.
- Ekaros 5mo ago
  How about a strange outdated idea. Stay where you are and start paying dividends? Well, somehow that is now unacceptable idea.
  - runako 5mo ago
    DropBox has been retiring shares fairly consistently. This is generally used as an alternative to dividends, and is done primarily for tax efficiency.
    - jjallen 5mo ago
      It's done to increase EPS per share and return cash to ongoing shareholders in a more tax friendly way, yes.
      - wombatpm 5mo ago
        People say this, but the cash is returned only if you sell. A dividend is cash in pocket plus the stock.
        robotresearcher 5mo ago
        The dividend is taxable ordinary income. The increased share value is not taxable until sold, and then it’s capital gains; usually a much lower rate.
joshmn 5mo ago
If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy): I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is useless. :( Edit: Thanks unofficial Dropbox support channel; thanks Drew :) Edit edit: Try my luck with my Apple account now, I guess—Tim Cook, you busy?
- swyx 5mo ago
  sad that going viral on social media is the only functional support system for many tech companies. good luck hope you get your mom's stuff.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago
    I was selling a GPU on Facebook marketplace during covid. The description was that the card was good for gaming or “turning dinosaurs into clean money”. Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human. I sold a rifle legally on an online auction site. The buyer was offered to pay with PayPal they were given the option to use. The buyer took that option, making me break PayPal TOS. Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human. Banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. SO banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human. Fuck. Big. Tech.
    - maxbond 5mo ago
      > Banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. SO banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. Prior to 2013 or after? Maybe they merged ban lists with PayPal (who owns them).
    - dcposch 5mo ago
      It's because Venmo is owned by PayPal
tinyhouse 5mo ago
Drew is clearly a very competent engineer who built an amazing product and company. He was the right person to build it from zero all the way to an IPO, but wasn't the right person to keep scaling it. Dropbox's product vision in the last 10 years was lacking to say the least. Their latest innovative product "Dash" is another flop, like Dropbox Password, Paper, and many others.
kmfrk 5mo ago
As tired as I am of the lack of improvement in Dropbox and the most of my nag-mails being warnings about my inactive Dropbox storage reaching "dangerous lows", I can't help be frustrated at how much the equivalent virtual drives from Apple and Microsoft suck, even today.
baggachipz 5mo ago
Remember when Dropbox was a folder that just syncs? [1] [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-most-people-like-Dropbox https://www.quora.com/Why-do-most-people-like-Dropbox
cmiles8 5mo ago
Dropbox was always a feature in search of a product. It’s stable and profitable (which is more than can be said of most tech companies these days), but the stock is basically flat since it’s IPO a decade ago.
sskates 5mo ago
Drew was the original inspiration for me to get into startups. He was a few years ahead of me at MIT and did MIT's Battlecode competition as well. He introduced me to Hacker News, Paul Graham's writing, YC, and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. What he built with Dropbox was the first proof point of the YC model. I'm tremendously appreciative of what he's done for the next generation of enterepreneurs.
resters 5mo ago
A few years ago Dropbox just stopped working for the basic thing it is supposed to do -- let me access lots of files without taking up tons of local drive space. Since then I have not stopped using/paying, but i have stopped counting on it and I have stopped adding new files to it, sharing files with it, etc. The constant marketing for "dropbox for business" (which is priced badly and is not something I've ever felt comfortable recommending to any business) was also quite irritating.
- kccqzy 5mo ago
  It’s funny that you think Dropbox is supposed to let you access lots of files without taking up tons of local drive space. I still think of Dropbox as a file synchronization tool, so taking up tons of local drive space is an expected behavior. It goes to show that people think of Dropbox in different ways.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
solfox 5mo ago
I had the opportunity to live with Drew back in 2006 when he, I, and another pair of YC founders Adam and Matt were living together and hacking away at our own startups in Cambridge. I remember Drew being a hard worker, humble, and a genuinely nice guy. It's probably self indulgent to claim that we all inspired him to eventually shift gears to Dropbox and apply to YC - but what a path it's been for him! I've always felt inspired by his meteoric innovation in cloud storage - Dropbox paved the way for all our modern cloud storage systems. We've fallen out of touch over the years, but I wish him well on whatever comes next.
aanet 5mo ago
Kudos to @DHouston and co. for starting and keeping the company going. Somehow, in my mind, Dropbox is always associated with the classic HN comment [1] about "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, ..." ;-) ;-) Trivial indeed /s [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
valdagger 5mo ago
Fuckin finally
HaloZero 5mo ago
I really hope the next person in charge gives up on business deals and aims for more personal updates. I store all my photos on Dropbox. The fact that they don’t a have a good way to manage it is still painful
- mcgrath_sh 5mo ago
  I too store all my photos on Dropbox. I used Hazel on macOS to move them into YYYY/YYYY-MM folders. I now use a bash script to do similar. This organization system has been rock solid for me for over a decade. I honestly don't want more than that. I dislike the obfuscation so many photo storage solutions use. I want my files and my folders.
brandon272 5mo ago
When Dropbox first came out I loved the simplicity of it for years. That rock solid little icon in my system tray that never bothered me, just reliably synced my files. It was excellent. At a certain point (mid-2010s) things started to go off the rails from a design, marketing and complexity standpoint. Suddenly having a Dropbox account felt a lot more complicated - so I stopped using it. The change was almost hard to describe, but I think it's encapsulated well if you compare the Dropbox homepage from, say, 2013 to 2019. 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20130701190140/https://www.dropbox.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130701190140/https://www.dropb... 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20191130224813/https://www.dropbox.com/?landing=dbv2 https://web.archive.org/web/20191130224813/https://www.dropb... I realize that companies that want to become large behemoths naturally seem to have to go down this path - just saying I miss the simplicity of it in its earlier form!
- micromacrofoot 5mo ago
  the curse of early success is getting a billion dollars to invest in your company only to discover that it's really hard to pay back a billion dollars
VirusNewbie 5mo ago
I've used for dropbox for the last 13+ years, was an early customer, and absolutely love the core product. However, in the last handful of years, I've been incredibly disappointed in the stagnation of their products. Dropbox was the first 'virtual desktop' I created that allowed me to hop into new companies and get going in a seamless way. Beyond just dotfiles, I was able to keep applications too, it was so easy to sync and get everything setup at a new company. When repl.it came out, I wondered why Dropbox hadn't done that first. There's all sorts of room for innovation here - being able to install the right binaries, perfectly configuring a cloud command line setup, syncing configs, etc. Photos - I have the majority of phots from my adult life stored on dropbox. But the searching is crap compared to google. It's not easy to share or make albums. Dropbox could have been a mini-social media site, a way to share photos, collages, albums easily with friends - but it has half the features of google photos! Collaborative Editing - They probably could have done something here too, but I never saw a compelling attempt. Dropbox is still a great product for file syncing, but I fear that they will slowly lose relevance if they don't get another hit product.
rkunal 5mo ago
Ashraf seems like a great leader. I am not too excited about the focus on AI. Lets see where it goes. Drew launched a great new product, fine tuned it to be one of most loved and then made profitable company. Respect
racl101 5mo ago
I always thought it was a shame that Dropbox never had a tier between its free tier which is not usable and its first paid tier. I would've gladly paid around $3, $5 for a few tens of Gigs of storage, but the almost $10 per month is too much. Then Apple iCloud came and filled that gap beautifully. So I give them my money. I feel like they left a lot of money on the table.
- Daneel_ 5mo ago
  Exactly my thoughts too. I abandoned Dropbox because there was no upgrade path from free to low-paid-tier. $10 a month is not cheap. Heck, I pay less than that for Amazon prime and that offers a lot more value. I don’t need 2TB of cloud storage - I need something like 100GB. And as a result, I never even considered it for my organisation when the time came to do enterprise cloud file sharing. That’s how it goes.
PeterWhittaker 5mo ago
In these days of concerns over digital sovereignty, I cannot help but wonder if they would be best served by moving to a privacy-protective European state, e.g., Germany or Switzerland (not EU but tends to align with EU regs, e.g., GDPR) and doubling down as a privacy protection service (to the extent permitted by law). Just musing....
varenc 5mo ago
end of an era! Dropbox has now fully ship-of-theseus'd itself from my perspective. (which is impressive honestly given the time frame)
dzonga 5mo ago
my take dhouston should go be a CTO somewhere. technically he's rich enough to never work again. but he's hungry, young & smart & can really push the industry forward - by taking one of the f500 that's tech adjacent & be CTO
RigelKentaurus 5mo ago
They had a terrific product that worked well in ~2013, but they haven't innovated since then (TBH, not sure what "innovation" means in the file-sync space.) Although Y-o-Y revenue is mostly flat, I'm a little surprised that they still brought in $630M the last quarter, and that they still have 2,000 employees. Looking at what Dropbox does, I would have guesstimated they were a 250-person company. All the best to their employees, but I think a big round of layoffs will be coming within the next couple of quarters.
jlarks32 5mo ago
I was lucky enough to work at Dropbox for a bit. Awesome engineering culture and such good people. Got to even grab a beer and rip karaoke with Drew. Thanks for creating such an awesome working environment Drew. I cannot say thank you enough for those memories or that experience. By far the best CEO and leader I've seen.
- Obscurity4340 5mo ago
  What is Dropbox's attitude towards things like Cryptamator? Do they want things like this to supplement and thus complement their unencrypted puic default?
- 4er_transform 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - thereitgoes456 5mo ago
    Many people worked for FTX, loved SBF and would have said he was a great leader too. People will love anyone who is good to them.
    - josephg 5mo ago
      And for good reason. Leadership isn't measured by stock price.
    - KptMarchewa 5mo ago
      I've must have missed where Dropbox's CEO committed securities fraud.
  - Sammi 5mo ago
    I'm surprised they've been able to keep the stock price and the revenue flat given they competitive environment they've been in for many years. They've been going head to head with the cloud infrastructure hyperscalers and mobile platform owners despite just being a file storage SaaS. It's weird to me that people ever expected more of Dropbox given who they were up against.
Jumptadel 5mo ago
This guy’s LinkedIn hid his undergrad and put up a 3 year Harvard Extension School management degree tells you all you need to know.
tonymet 5mo ago
what are they building?
- inetknght 5mo ago
  rsync for walled gardens
  - tonymet 5mo ago
    that's actually a cool feature
    - inetknght 5mo ago
      Well, yeah, it would be. Except that it's for walled gardens which means it's incompatible with rsync.
      - tonymet 5mo ago
        they were smart enough to meter it
        inetknght 4mo ago
        > they were smart enough to meter it greedy* enough, sure
  - malux85 5mo ago
    Rsync for my mum, rsync for my sister, rsync for my lawyer, my teacher, my plumber, rsync for people who just want a folder with an icon that says it's working. Rsync for people who just want a folder and it automatically shows up on all of their computers and phones at once. Rsync for people who are never going to use rsync because an ancient command line application with a zillion flags on it is just about as user hostile as you can get. Is there a bunch of tech geeks who can rsync themselves? Of course there are, and this product absolutely, categorically and unambiguously isnt for them. But guess what? There's 100,000,000 people who both want their folders synced and have no idea how to use rsync (and dont want to). Thats what they are building, and that's who its for, and thats why the have 2.5 billion in annual revenue. Because they famously ignored the "iTs jUsT rSYnC" crowd, and built a product that actually works for 100 million people
zhyder 5mo ago
Aside from the issue of platform owners (Apple, Google, Microsoft) offering storage sync as an integrated feature, which others have pointed out, the other reason growth is limited is that filesystem storage and sync thereof has become less critical over time. Our apps increasingly do cloud-native walled-garden storage: docs in Google Docs / Notion / Confluence, mocks in Figma, etc. And code was cloud-native with version control much earlier. I need sync for just photos on my phone (which Apple or Google are better for), and a small number of esigned PDFs and tax documents (for which any provider's free tier suffices). Dropbox solved a problem of the 2010s.
- dexwiz 5mo ago
  Files became an implementation detail.
  - pishpash 5mo ago
    It's mobile devices not having user-facing files as first-class citizens. The mobile era started just as Dropbox started to solve a computer era problem. Bad timing.
    - makeitdouble 5mo ago
      I'd argue Dropbox became as big as they are thanks to mobile taking off. In a computer only world there are myriads of other solutions, elegant or not. Most work computers were permanently plugged into network shared folders, and would have over the VPN access for on the road salesmen etc. Home users mostly didn't care about cloud storage or shareable folders, those who did could get away with ftp (basically supported everywhere, like straight in explorer windows) Dropbox flourished because most people got a second device, always connected, but with no decent file management. Many of us used Dropbox not even for sync but just to properly handle files.
      - farfatched 5mo ago
        They were a transitional technology.
onesingleblast 5mo ago
Your Python client eats all my CPU. My CPU usage goes down from 75% to 5% when I close it.
tsunamifury 5mo ago
How is this company still alive? They’ve dragged their feet on evolving and offer nothing new in almost a decade.
Liftyee 5mo ago
It would be a shame to see Dropbox decline. They're the last big player to maintain a Linux sync client that just works reliably. I've tried to host Nextcloud and tried Syncthing as well, but Dropbox has always worked for when I just want the problem solved without worrying about something going down. Open to recommendations...
crossroadsguy 5mo ago
I have been one of the very early users. Maybe from the first weeks (if not days). It used to be such a good app and service. So good that I used to ask my friends why they didn't already use it. That was a few many years ago; at best. Since then, Dropbox has steadily been going downhill and with intent, at least for a consumer. Quite a few folks are ditching its paid plan (including me), just using its free tier (to tiny tasks like notes sync etc) and moving the bulk of their data storage elsewhere (like I did - reluctantly to object storage providers via many FOSS CLI tools; would have loved to keep paying for the old Dropbox). Hostile pricing was not the only concern; hostile UX, an insanely bloated app, and breaking features (because sure, those are not bugs) galore. Now the native file sync is a really doomed space for individual customers (because I have never explored what's out there exclusively for enterprise). Dropbox is well Dropbox New. Anyone in their right minds, or if anyone has a device other than an Apple device, will not even think of relying on the (even after years of complaints) opaque and buggy iCloud. Google Drive, while most reliable technically, is a really bad bet as a filesystem file sync tool; besides, they are much more bloated than Dropbox, and their suite offerings are intertwined with it so deep. Smaller offerings like Tresorit (though most "native" among its peers) are too buggy and have questionable practices like that of pCloud, etc. So while the entire personal/consumer filesystem file sync system has gone to the gutter now, Dropbox is still a bad solution among quite worse ones and that's really sad. From storing 100s of GBs at one point, I am back to just ~300 MB in Dropbox now. Just couldn't trust it anymore after it broke my workflows quite a few times and still keeps trying with that sudden pop-up of "Update Available" which is not really an app update (app updates silently in the bg; all hail Electron), that is actually a sly way to make you enable its folder on File Provider API feature. I am sure it is a good feature for many but for heaven's sake the very reason I started using (and still use Dropbox for) is because it syncs my complete files across systems. The lest you can do is not actively try to make me click on it. Besides I don't want any other bloody thing. Just give me that feature, and only that, and take my money and in a native app while we are at it. There are LLMs now, give us back a native app at least. Seeing the focus on "AI" I am pretty sure very soon I'll have to take even that ~300 MB elsewhere. PS. Their support is absolutely questionable. I've had a chance to contact them for some bugs. Goodness, it took literally weeks, and dozens of messages, to make them accept it's a bug and even then they didn't really accept they just stopped responding (so I assume they accepted it. Besides it was never fixed :D).
klik99 5mo ago
He finally realized that you could just rsync
hyfgfh 5mo ago
They had some great miss opportunities with Paper and easy storage, but it seems they stopped on the MVP stage
sporkland 5mo ago
I walked into the Mint one night because I liked to grab a bad cocktail and some good karaoke.. some guy got on stage and belted out a beautiful version of Rocket Man. I looked closed and it was Drew. Guy has pipes. Oh his software was pretty good too.
hieKVj2ECC 5mo ago
just here to say I love Dropbox since I ran Ubuntu long ago and Windows and Android. I am still on it and cant thank them enough
dbg31415 5mo ago
[dead]
ulfw 5mo ago
Used to be a (paid) dropbox customer for many years because frankly nothing beat dropbox on stability and performance for a long time. What killed them for me was: - idiotic pricing model. You either pay little for little storage or a lot for a lot. Like most people I needed more than a tiny bit and less than a shitton of storage and there was no offering for me - the idiotic decision to not support ARM Macs for a good year. That's what broke the camel's back and I decided to offload to other services only to realise it's not that important who you're with. It's a commodity product - which leads to the last point: Dropbox never found something innovative or interesting to set them apart. They tried a lot of random products, none appealed to me.
DuzAwe 5mo ago
I turned my back on Dropbox when they add a war criminal on the board. Dove headfirst into open source alts. Never really looked back.
- simonebrunozzi 5mo ago
  Are you talking about Condoleezza Rice ?
  - pbiggar 5mo ago
    Definitely. Not to mention that their major investor, Sequoia, has been war profiteering and Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire has been publicly islamophobic and a huge supporter of the genocide and occupation in Palestine.
olliebrkr 5mo ago
I always really liked Dropbox, but after a while it just made more sense to consolidate and start using Proton Drive. Do I miss Dropbox? Sure, but I don't miss the extra payment.
sylens 5mo ago
I just checked my email and saw that my earliest use of Dropbox was with its 3rd alpha for Linux in August 2008. That is an awfully long time to be using a service. I remember how exciting it was when they released an Android client for my HTC Incredible to run
alexnewman 5mo ago
Man people who owned stock and sold calls when it went up killed it.
isodev 5mo ago
Oh I didn't know Dropox still exists.
khernandezrt 5mo ago
Never heard of a single bad thing about Dropbox. Used them since i can remember. Never had issues.

375 points by aghuang 5mo ago

tuananh 5mo ago

if you're looking to get your data out of dropbox, rclone is godsend. it's very good + super fast.

georgel 5mo ago

The circle is complete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

pikseladam 5mo ago
i didn't expect to laugh when i enter news today :)
- ignoramous 5mo ago
  Daniel Gackle thinks BrandonM's is most probably the most misunderstood comment in news.yc history. from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281 Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years. I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here. When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is. The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea. * described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275 More: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20brandonm&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - simoncion 5mo ago
    > People forget that this is a real person. Relatedly, people tend to forget that people who are fully aware that a real person has written a foolish and/or shortsighted comment will direct criticism at said comment. I understand that there exist people who -to oversimplify- have as their creed "Thou shall not directly say anything negative about anyone ever."... but that's a minority of people. That "soft pedal" stuff doesn't work for a notable subset of people, and -for some- generates _way_ more anxiety and stress than a frank and earnest discussion about just how stupid the stupid thing you just did is. [0] I get that some folks are Care Bears (affectionate, non-derogatory), but not only is that not the only way to be, folks who are like that freak out a not-insignificant subset of the population. > When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. Perhaps. But it looks to me like an eighth or so of the top-level commenters on the OP are talking as if the thing under discussion is application software. Maybe folks consistently abbreviated "YCombinator Funding Application" as "App" and "application software" as "application" at the time, but -if so- that's not made clear to me by reading the commentary. [0] I'd also object to any characterization that BrandonM's commentary is nitpicking in any regard. Unless you know someone pretty well, you have no idea what their background is, how careful they are, or how diligently they keep their appointments with the rubber duck. Anyone who has been in this business for five, ten+ years has seen people put a lot of work into something, but fail to understand or uncover one or more basic truths that invalidate all the work they've done. Basic sanity checks are useful.
sillysaurusx 5mo ago
I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature. Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing). In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files, since visiting an html page in a browser serves that file and relative links are preserved. I guess it's a losing value proposition, but it sure would be nice. It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.
- jeffbee 5mo ago
  > right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item You have described Google Drive.
  - sillysaurusx 5mo ago
    Not quite; it's not a direct link to the item. Put <img src="foo.jpg"> into an html file, alongside foo.jpg. In the original Dropbox, if you opened a link to the html file, you'd see a webpage that successfully rendered foo.jpg. So you could use it as a static file host.
    - georgel 5mo ago
      It was such a nice feature too, but very easily and quickly abused.
- tyler71 5mo ago
  pcloud with the public folder works well. I've uploaded a few html ebooks with relative routing and it has worked fine.
  - sillysaurusx 5mo ago
    Where's the public folder? I tried uploading an html file but can't get a direct link to it: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ6NzI5ZoJ0CG3nPXqBFrHeL4gaezYprgxjV https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ6NzI5ZoJ0CG3nPXqBF...
giancarlostoro 5mo ago
It is a darn shame, if the major OS providers didn't roll their own cloud storage, Dropbox could have been the default go-to across the board, and any other competitors that would have risen.
- ADent 5mo ago
  They were seemingly everywhere and lots of apps and services offered Dropbox as an option. 200 million users in 2013. Then they crippled the free plan and Apple and MS started pushing their services hard. And Dropbox seemed less ubiquitous after that.
  - giancarlostoro 5mo ago
    I remember even Ubuntu had their own storage offering, which had they kept it going, I might have subscribed to to this day. Shame, would have been an easy way for Ubuntu to fund itself.
1970-01-01 5mo ago
It was quite a stupid and expensive ride, but they were vindicated, especially on point 3: >Our business is in a stronger position than it's been in years >What’s energized me most since joining Dropbox is the connection people have with our brand >It gives me a lot of confidence in what’s ahead for Dropbox All corporate fluff, no actual content.
- urams 5mo ago
  Point 3 was not "'viral' or income generating" and DBX pioneered one of the most viral campaigns (give-get) and generates almost $1B a year in free cash flows? How is that vindication?
  - 1970-01-01 5mo ago
    Their roadmap doesn't exist beyond their one-hit-wonder. CEOs are stepping down because there is no future for the company unless you count acquisition by Amazon or Google or Apple, which will result in the entire company being walked to the grave.
    - urams 5mo ago
      This is really a non-answer. If your point is "Dropbox is a struggling company and therefore all criticism of it ever is fully validated no matter the timeline" then any criticism of any company ever will be validated eventually which is absurd.
arealaccount 5mo ago
Man HN was a different place back then. People sharing ideas and getting constructive (even if comically wrong) feedback. It reads more like founders and hackers helping each other. The discussions lately are more like folks armchair analyzing or speculating companies that are already incumbent tech giants. Or maybe I just click those headlines at a higher rate..
- brittlepeanut 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - supern0va 5mo ago
    And yet, it somehow has significantly better conversations than most places online. Maybe on par with reddit 10-15 years ago. It's frankly depressing how few places there are to have quality conversations, particularly for general tech.
    - ricardobayes 5mo ago
      Yes, although unfortunately the only problem with it, there's no way to contribute to older topics in a meaningful way. Due to the nature of this format not even the original author checks old comments and absolutely no chance any new conversation sparks out of it.
      - supern0va 5mo ago
        >Due to the nature of this format not even the original author checks old comments and absolutely no chance any new conversation sparks out of it. Sometimes I wonder if the format actually helps. I suspect that when you know you can pretend you didn't see a reply to your comment, you feel less likely to need to defend yourself when you realize you might be wrong. You can just close the tab and, since there was no notification, just move on without the ego hit.
    - jsbisviewtiful 5mo ago
CSMastermind 5mo ago
Wow cool to see.

gigatree 5mo ago

Board finally realized people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs

jedberg 5mo ago
For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Edit: Read the comment below, it's information I should have included in the first place. It's important to note that the comment was helpful at the time, and only became a meme later.
- sillysaurusx 5mo ago
  > Most people I know e-mail files to themselves It would be nice if that still worked. My resume exists in an iCloud drive, and I spent ten minutes on my phone trying to figure out how to attach it to a gmail message before giving up. "Copying" a file isn't even a well-defined operation anymore. (Or at least "pasting" doesn't always paste it.)
  - genxy 5mo ago
    When you get stuck in a task like this, you realize that civilization will collapse with a whimper.
  - dghlsakjg 5mo ago
    It’s literally: click the paper clip logo in Gmail, tap files, pick your file. You can also just go into the files app, tap and hold, tap copy, go to Gmail tap and hold in your draft email, tap paste. There’s other paths that work too, like hitting the “send to” logo in files and then selecting Gmail. It’s really the exact same patterns I might use on a computer for the most part.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - matsemann 5mo ago

browningstreet 5mo ago

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Being able to set local and not-local flags on files/folders is great. I spent some time trying to use a few of their alternatives, plus their mobile client apps, and it's kinda just Dropbox still.

1970-01-01 5mo ago
You could just put it on a local disk? 512GB sdcard is like $15 at Walmart.
- dghlsakjg 5mo ago
  Check the price of flash memory again. That $15 card is almost certainly a scam.
  - dawnerd 5mo ago
    Yeah their memory of how much memory costs is outdated. I was just at a walmart this weekend and a 128 card was 30 bucks.
  - matsemann 5mo ago
    At least if bought from Amazon. It will happily accept writing 512 GB to it, but it's not stored anywhere.
    - irishcoffee 5mo ago
      Yep that burned me once. Lesson learned.
- browningstreet 5mo ago
  I wanted a forever backup. I'm going to trust Apple and a hard drive.

sidcool 5mo ago

Is he the next Member of Technical staff at Anthropic?

TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
No, that's Pope Leo.

wwweston 5mo ago

Really hope that all the positives in the leadership announcement are true. Things have reached the point where I probably could use open sync+storage options to achieve what I do with Dropbox (and perhaps eventually I will do that as a hedge against the risks of Dropbox enshitification). But I'd love to see Dropbox continue to provide worthy convenient service.

vednig 5mo ago

I wish Drew all the best for his journey, he built the market for many generations to come.

postalcoder 5mo ago

I think I've spent more on dropbox, lifetime, than most other subscriptions (it's also the first service i thought was worth paying a subscription for). I still pay for it. Drew built a great service. On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. All I care about is packrat and good syncing. Is there anybody that loves anything they've built in the last fifteen years? I feel like the company could have had a skeleton crew keeping the lights on and I wouldn't have noticed a thing. Now, in 2026, all I want is for my coding agent to be able to grep the files in dropbox. Feel like dropbox will sooner rely on selling merch than offer something useful like that, though.

microtonal 5mo ago
All I care about is packrat and good syncing. For me that and end-to-end encryption (I know it's supported for teams now). Instead they just added more annoyances over time. Every time I logged into the web interface, I would get stupid upselling advertisements (maybe don't badger your paying users with that nonsense)? I replaced the official client by Maestral years ago, because they switched to embedding a web browser, and the AFAIR the client was also trying to do upsells. My wife were and I were customers for years. But we finally decided to terminate our subscription last year. Mostly because of the constant upgrade nagging + the orange guy taking office and Dropbox not providing E2E encryption on family accounts. So we switched to Proton Drive. It's worse in many ways, but at least it's E2E encrypted and doesn't shove upgrading ads in our faces all the time. It's sad, Dropbox was really a great product.
- plasticsoprano 5mo ago
  E2E is supported for specific types of folders available only to teams but the admin has to enable it and that folder has to be used. You can't apply it team wide to all users. It's a very poor implementation.
  - insanitybit 5mo ago
    If you want E2E, encrypt your data yourself. By far the simplest, safest solution to the problem.

hylaride 5mo ago

Dropbox was an excellent service back in the day. Then they re-wrote their desktop apps (I think in python?) and it never synced cleanly after that. I'm all-in on the apple ecosystem, so while it's not perfect, iCloud storage works better. Was a shame, though.

jeffbee 5mo ago
The biggest lesson I learned working at Dropbox was how toxic python is. If you have an unmanageable python code base, and hire Guido himself to help you fix it, he'll dig you into an even deeper hole and then quit. Which honestly was an extension of my experience at Google. When I left Google for Dropbox, python at Google was also in crisis. These two companies cemented my "python: not even once" stance.
- varun_ch 5mo ago
  TIL the creator of Python worked at Dropbox for 6 years.
- DoctorDabadedoo 5mo ago
  I would say that in general dynamic type languages are problematic in a large codebase without strict safeguards (Any everywhere, untested paths, lack of test coverage, large methods with different return scopes, etc.). I've worked a long time in C++ land in large codebases and the issues there are different, but to undig a project from the spaguetti land is like pulling teeth.
matsemann 5mo ago
It was python from the start ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8892 ), but maybe the 2to3 migration, or just a general rewrite you're thinking of?
- hylaride 5mo ago
  There was a "major" change in the agent roughly a decade ago. Dropbox went from being a simple folder sync tool to a much more bloated agent that never synced cleanly. I don't know if they just moved away from some modules that were written in C or something, but I gave up on it soon after.

ivraatiems 5mo ago

I think Dropbox is great, but I got about 10GB of storage via affiliate links ten years ago and I've never upgraded or paid a cent since. I'm sure I'm a huge loss for them. And even despite enjoying their service, if Google Drive produced a Windows integration that actually worked well, I'd leave for it in a minute. I'd never use OneDrive, but that's more out of spite at Microsoft shoving it at me than because it is bad in any way I know of clearly.

ecommerceguy 5mo ago

call me crazy im still using a 100gb box account from when i bought an hp touchpad. that thing was so cool.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

njt 5mo ago

I recently placed some PDF files for some nontechnical people on Dropbox. To avoid confusing them with the long complicated Dropbox URL, I even created a shortened link for them to use (think https://event.myorg.test https://event.myorg.test). Almost none of them had Dropbox accounts. I found out later from someone that 90% of them couldn’t access the files. The link didn’t require a login but they made it look to the unsophisticated observer that you need an account to get the files. So these folks (most of them were elderly), just gave up.

aeyes 5mo ago
But you don't need a Dropbox account to view any file for which you created a shareable link. If you add raw=1 to the URL then it will directly show in the browser without the Dropbox viewer. Or did you share a folder?
- mystifyingpoi 5mo ago
  You don't need account, that's for sure, but multiple times I've seen a big upsell popup that suggests that account is required, while the tiny gray button "skip to files" is on the very bottom. I hate such patterns.
- MaxL93 5mo ago
  It's maddening that they force you to tweak with the URLs just so you can feed people a link that works for them though
restruxt 5mo ago
The dark pattern nags to unregistered users for shared files are the number one reason I permanently abandoned Dropbox for personal and business use. It was subtle at first, then it got pathetically bad. When a company like Dropbox prioritizes user account growth over usability, that company debases itself and deserves to lose.
afro88 5mo ago
My elderly mother ended up with a Dropbox subscription because someone sent her a file on Dropbox, that she could technically access for free, but she got dark patterned into creating an account and subscribing. To a yearly plan no less

semiinfinitely 5mo ago

[flagged]

krashidov 5mo ago

I am surprised they aren't leaning into the agent dev tool mania right now. File syncing is actually very in demand right now and everyone is not doing a great job figuring it out.

arbirk 5mo ago

They focused on the wrong product imo. File sync as in syncing the files you are actively working on and temporary files like clipboard etc. is powerful. Syncing folders and doing backups is difficult and expensive. I am still looking for a good product that makes it easy to do all that.

unpopularopp 5mo ago

I wish they had a plan between free and 120€/year. I don't need 2TB storage but the free plan's 2GB is also nothing

zengid 5mo ago

Drew was CEO for almost 20 years right? that's a heck of a run!

farcaster 5mo ago

10 years ago they had such a nice feature of grabbing your pictures metadata and showing them on the globe (Immich does this too). And they just scrapped it for no reason. I guess they wanted to make dropbox into more of a collaborative google docs kind of thing. But that's not why I started paying for it.

jabedude 5mo ago

Why are the HN comments about how Dropbox's business is not doing well? I don't think there's any indication that Drew is stepping down because of that?

toephu2 5mo ago
Because there is PR speak, and then there is reality.
layer8 5mo ago
A change in long-standing leadership often signifies a change in strategy, whether warranted or not. It’s more likely to deteriorate than to improve the offering, especially given that Dropbox is largely a “finished” product.
- jabedude 5mo ago
  That's relevant to the future prospects of the product, but most of the comments are bemoaning the current and previous state of Dropbox. Just seems unrelated to me

kasperset 5mo ago

One of my favorite product, it just works in the background. I do not need any more features than what it has currently. None of the competitors have this ability to just blend in the background. I hope they stay for a long time.

layer8 5mo ago
The one useful feature it still lacks is E2EE for non-team accounts. Though you can emulate that with third-party tools.

victorkulla 5mo ago

[flagged]

jaredcwhite 5mo ago

I've used and paid for Dropbox for well over a decade. Other than the rare hiccup every few years (usually due to switching machines/OSes or whatnot), it's been rock solid and a true workhorse. I know there are many other options, including iCloud Drive which I use sparingly, but Dropbox is a service I trust. I hope it continues in that manner and they don't destroy their reputation with a woebegone "pivot to AI".

toephu2 5mo ago

As Steve Jobs famously told Drew Houston..."you have a feature, not a product." Jobs was ultimately right in the end.

convenwis 5mo ago
He was right in a sense but $6b market cap is nothing to sneeze at.
layer8 5mo ago
I wouldn’t have a Dropbox subscription if it was merely a feature attached to some product. I have it because it’s an independent service.
alexandre_m 5mo ago
[flagged]

victorkulla 5mo ago

[flagged]

thm 5mo ago

So, Web 2.0 is finally over now?

bhouston 5mo ago

Dropbox's stock has been stuck at around $6B valuation for years with flat growth and income around $2.5B per year. It is just stuck. Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation. I think it is the market, not the leadership. It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive). Not sure where to go since the big guys won't acquire you given that they have alternatives. Maybe a business software acquirer like Salesforce or Dell? Or an AI company that would use this type of cloud storage as a AI document store / collaboration hub? I honestly do not know where to go.

Ekaros 5mo ago
How about a strange outdated idea. Stay where you are and start paying dividends? Well, somehow that is now unacceptable idea.
- runako 5mo ago
  DropBox has been retiring shares fairly consistently. This is generally used as an alternative to dividends, and is done primarily for tax efficiency.
  - jjallen 5mo ago
    It's done to increase EPS per share and return cash to ongoing shareholders in a more tax friendly way, yes.
    - wombatpm 5mo ago
      People say this, but the cash is returned only if you sell. A dividend is cash in pocket plus the stock.
      - robotresearcher 5mo ago
        The dividend is taxable ordinary income. The increased share value is not taxable until sold, and then it’s capital gains; usually a much lower rate.

joshmn 5mo ago

If there are any Dropboxers here (drew—I emailed you a few weeks ago, but I imagine you're busy): I went to prison for 18 months, my digital and physical life was stolen from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451567 applies to my Dropbox account (and Apple but separate problem); I just received the "your account will be going bye-bye" email. I have very important dead-mom-club stuff in there, and support is useless. :( Edit: Thanks unofficial Dropbox support channel; thanks Drew :) Edit edit: Try my luck with my Apple account now, I guess—Tim Cook, you busy?

swyx 5mo ago
sad that going viral on social media is the only functional support system for many tech companies. good luck hope you get your mom's stuff.
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago
  I was selling a GPU on Facebook marketplace during covid. The description was that the card was good for gaming or “turning dinosaurs into clean money”. Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human. I sold a rifle legally on an online auction site. The buyer was offered to pay with PayPal they were given the option to use. The buyer took that option, making me break PayPal TOS. Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human. Banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. SO banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. Banned permanently and no way to ever reach a human. Fuck. Big. Tech.
  - maxbond 5mo ago
    > Banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. SO banned from Venmo, absolutely no idea why. Prior to 2013 or after? Maybe they merged ban lists with PayPal (who owns them).
  - dcposch 5mo ago
    It's because Venmo is owned by PayPal

tinyhouse 5mo ago

Drew is clearly a very competent engineer who built an amazing product and company. He was the right person to build it from zero all the way to an IPO, but wasn't the right person to keep scaling it. Dropbox's product vision in the last 10 years was lacking to say the least. Their latest innovative product "Dash" is another flop, like Dropbox Password, Paper, and many others.

kmfrk 5mo ago

As tired as I am of the lack of improvement in Dropbox and the most of my nag-mails being warnings about my inactive Dropbox storage reaching "dangerous lows", I can't help be frustrated at how much the equivalent virtual drives from Apple and Microsoft suck, even today.

baggachipz 5mo ago

Remember when Dropbox was a folder that just syncs? [1] [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-most-people-like-Dropbox https://www.quora.com/Why-do-most-people-like-Dropbox

cmiles8 5mo ago

Dropbox was always a feature in search of a product. It’s stable and profitable (which is more than can be said of most tech companies these days), but the stock is basically flat since it’s IPO a decade ago.

sskates 5mo ago

Drew was the original inspiration for me to get into startups. He was a few years ahead of me at MIT and did MIT's Battlecode competition as well. He introduced me to Hacker News, Paul Graham's writing, YC, and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. What he built with Dropbox was the first proof point of the YC model. I'm tremendously appreciative of what he's done for the next generation of enterepreneurs.

resters 5mo ago

A few years ago Dropbox just stopped working for the basic thing it is supposed to do -- let me access lots of files without taking up tons of local drive space. Since then I have not stopped using/paying, but i have stopped counting on it and I have stopped adding new files to it, sharing files with it, etc. The constant marketing for "dropbox for business" (which is priced badly and is not something I've ever felt comfortable recommending to any business) was also quite irritating.

kccqzy 5mo ago
It’s funny that you think Dropbox is supposed to let you access lots of files without taking up tons of local drive space. I still think of Dropbox as a file synchronization tool, so taking up tons of local drive space is an expected behavior. It goes to show that people think of Dropbox in different ways.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

solfox 5mo ago

I had the opportunity to live with Drew back in 2006 when he, I, and another pair of YC founders Adam and Matt were living together and hacking away at our own startups in Cambridge. I remember Drew being a hard worker, humble, and a genuinely nice guy. It's probably self indulgent to claim that we all inspired him to eventually shift gears to Dropbox and apply to YC - but what a path it's been for him! I've always felt inspired by his meteoric innovation in cloud storage - Dropbox paved the way for all our modern cloud storage systems. We've fallen out of touch over the years, but I wish him well on whatever comes next.

aanet 5mo ago

Kudos to @DHouston and co. for starting and keeping the company going. Somehow, in my mind, Dropbox is always associated with the classic HN comment [1] about "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, ..." ;-) ;-) Trivial indeed /s [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

valdagger 5mo ago

Fuckin finally

HaloZero 5mo ago

I really hope the next person in charge gives up on business deals and aims for more personal updates. I store all my photos on Dropbox. The fact that they don’t a have a good way to manage it is still painful

mcgrath_sh 5mo ago
I too store all my photos on Dropbox. I used Hazel on macOS to move them into YYYY/YYYY-MM folders. I now use a bash script to do similar. This organization system has been rock solid for me for over a decade. I honestly don't want more than that. I dislike the obfuscation so many photo storage solutions use. I want my files and my folders.

brandon272 5mo ago

When Dropbox first came out I loved the simplicity of it for years. That rock solid little icon in my system tray that never bothered me, just reliably synced my files. It was excellent. At a certain point (mid-2010s) things started to go off the rails from a design, marketing and complexity standpoint. Suddenly having a Dropbox account felt a lot more complicated - so I stopped using it. The change was almost hard to describe, but I think it's encapsulated well if you compare the Dropbox homepage from, say, 2013 to 2019. 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20130701190140/https://www.dropbox.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130701190140/https://www.dropb... 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20191130224813/https://www.dropbox.com/?landing=dbv2 https://web.archive.org/web/20191130224813/https://www.dropb... I realize that companies that want to become large behemoths naturally seem to have to go down this path - just saying I miss the simplicity of it in its earlier form!

micromacrofoot 5mo ago
the curse of early success is getting a billion dollars to invest in your company only to discover that it's really hard to pay back a billion dollars

VirusNewbie 5mo ago

I've used for dropbox for the last 13+ years, was an early customer, and absolutely love the core product. However, in the last handful of years, I've been incredibly disappointed in the stagnation of their products. Dropbox was the first 'virtual desktop' I created that allowed me to hop into new companies and get going in a seamless way. Beyond just dotfiles, I was able to keep applications too, it was so easy to sync and get everything setup at a new company. When repl.it came out, I wondered why Dropbox hadn't done that first. There's all sorts of room for innovation here - being able to install the right binaries, perfectly configuring a cloud command line setup, syncing configs, etc. Photos - I have the majority of phots from my adult life stored on dropbox. But the searching is crap compared to google. It's not easy to share or make albums. Dropbox could have been a mini-social media site, a way to share photos, collages, albums easily with friends - but it has half the features of google photos! Collaborative Editing - They probably could have done something here too, but I never saw a compelling attempt. Dropbox is still a great product for file syncing, but I fear that they will slowly lose relevance if they don't get another hit product.

rkunal 5mo ago

Ashraf seems like a great leader. I am not too excited about the focus on AI. Lets see where it goes. Drew launched a great new product, fine tuned it to be one of most loved and then made profitable company. Respect

racl101 5mo ago

I always thought it was a shame that Dropbox never had a tier between its free tier which is not usable and its first paid tier. I would've gladly paid around $3, $5 for a few tens of Gigs of storage, but the almost $10 per month is too much. Then Apple iCloud came and filled that gap beautifully. So I give them my money. I feel like they left a lot of money on the table.

Daneel_ 5mo ago
Exactly my thoughts too. I abandoned Dropbox because there was no upgrade path from free to low-paid-tier. $10 a month is not cheap. Heck, I pay less than that for Amazon prime and that offers a lot more value. I don’t need 2TB of cloud storage - I need something like 100GB. And as a result, I never even considered it for my organisation when the time came to do enterprise cloud file sharing. That’s how it goes.

PeterWhittaker 5mo ago

In these days of concerns over digital sovereignty, I cannot help but wonder if they would be best served by moving to a privacy-protective European state, e.g., Germany or Switzerland (not EU but tends to align with EU regs, e.g., GDPR) and doubling down as a privacy protection service (to the extent permitted by law). Just musing....

varenc 5mo ago

end of an era! Dropbox has now fully ship-of-theseus'd itself from my perspective. (which is impressive honestly given the time frame)

dzonga 5mo ago

my take dhouston should go be a CTO somewhere. technically he's rich enough to never work again. but he's hungry, young & smart & can really push the industry forward - by taking one of the f500 that's tech adjacent & be CTO

RigelKentaurus 5mo ago

They had a terrific product that worked well in ~2013, but they haven't innovated since then (TBH, not sure what "innovation" means in the file-sync space.) Although Y-o-Y revenue is mostly flat, I'm a little surprised that they still brought in $630M the last quarter, and that they still have 2,000 employees. Looking at what Dropbox does, I would have guesstimated they were a 250-person company. All the best to their employees, but I think a big round of layoffs will be coming within the next couple of quarters.

jlarks32 5mo ago

I was lucky enough to work at Dropbox for a bit. Awesome engineering culture and such good people. Got to even grab a beer and rip karaoke with Drew. Thanks for creating such an awesome working environment Drew. I cannot say thank you enough for those memories or that experience. By far the best CEO and leader I've seen.

Obscurity4340 5mo ago
What is Dropbox's attitude towards things like Cryptamator? Do they want things like this to supplement and thus complement their unencrypted puic default?
4er_transform 5mo ago
[flagged]
- thereitgoes456 5mo ago
  Many people worked for FTX, loved SBF and would have said he was a great leader too. People will love anyone who is good to them.
  - josephg 5mo ago
    And for good reason. Leadership isn't measured by stock price.
  - KptMarchewa 5mo ago
    I've must have missed where Dropbox's CEO committed securities fraud.
- Sammi 5mo ago
  I'm surprised they've been able to keep the stock price and the revenue flat given they competitive environment they've been in for many years. They've been going head to head with the cloud infrastructure hyperscalers and mobile platform owners despite just being a file storage SaaS. It's weird to me that people ever expected more of Dropbox given who they were up against.

Jumptadel 5mo ago

This guy’s LinkedIn hid his undergrad and put up a 3 year Harvard Extension School management degree tells you all you need to know.

tonymet 5mo ago

what are they building?

inetknght 5mo ago
rsync for walled gardens
- tonymet 5mo ago
  that's actually a cool feature
  - inetknght 5mo ago
    Well, yeah, it would be. Except that it's for walled gardens which means it's incompatible with rsync.
    - tonymet 5mo ago
      they were smart enough to meter it
      - inetknght 4mo ago
        > they were smart enough to meter it greedy* enough, sure
- malux85 5mo ago
  Rsync for my mum, rsync for my sister, rsync for my lawyer, my teacher, my plumber, rsync for people who just want a folder with an icon that says it's working. Rsync for people who just want a folder and it automatically shows up on all of their computers and phones at once. Rsync for people who are never going to use rsync because an ancient command line application with a zillion flags on it is just about as user hostile as you can get. Is there a bunch of tech geeks who can rsync themselves? Of course there are, and this product absolutely, categorically and unambiguously isnt for them. But guess what? There's 100,000,000 people who both want their folders synced and have no idea how to use rsync (and dont want to). Thats what they are building, and that's who its for, and thats why the have 2.5 billion in annual revenue. Because they famously ignored the "iTs jUsT rSYnC" crowd, and built a product that actually works for 100 million people

zhyder 5mo ago

Aside from the issue of platform owners (Apple, Google, Microsoft) offering storage sync as an integrated feature, which others have pointed out, the other reason growth is limited is that filesystem storage and sync thereof has become less critical over time. Our apps increasingly do cloud-native walled-garden storage: docs in Google Docs / Notion / Confluence, mocks in Figma, etc. And code was cloud-native with version control much earlier. I need sync for just photos on my phone (which Apple or Google are better for), and a small number of esigned PDFs and tax documents (for which any provider's free tier suffices). Dropbox solved a problem of the 2010s.

dexwiz 5mo ago
Files became an implementation detail.
- pishpash 5mo ago
  It's mobile devices not having user-facing files as first-class citizens. The mobile era started just as Dropbox started to solve a computer era problem. Bad timing.
  - makeitdouble 5mo ago
    I'd argue Dropbox became as big as they are thanks to mobile taking off. In a computer only world there are myriads of other solutions, elegant or not. Most work computers were permanently plugged into network shared folders, and would have over the VPN access for on the road salesmen etc. Home users mostly didn't care about cloud storage or shareable folders, those who did could get away with ftp (basically supported everywhere, like straight in explorer windows) Dropbox flourished because most people got a second device, always connected, but with no decent file management. Many of us used Dropbox not even for sync but just to properly handle files.
    - farfatched 5mo ago
      They were a transitional technology.

onesingleblast 5mo ago

Your Python client eats all my CPU. My CPU usage goes down from 75% to 5% when I close it.

tsunamifury 5mo ago

How is this company still alive? They’ve dragged their feet on evolving and offer nothing new in almost a decade.

Liftyee 5mo ago

It would be a shame to see Dropbox decline. They're the last big player to maintain a Linux sync client that just works reliably. I've tried to host Nextcloud and tried Syncthing as well, but Dropbox has always worked for when I just want the problem solved without worrying about something going down. Open to recommendations...

crossroadsguy 5mo ago

I have been one of the very early users. Maybe from the first weeks (if not days). It used to be such a good app and service. So good that I used to ask my friends why they didn't already use it. That was a few many years ago; at best. Since then, Dropbox has steadily been going downhill and with intent, at least for a consumer. Quite a few folks are ditching its paid plan (including me), just using its free tier (to tiny tasks like notes sync etc) and moving the bulk of their data storage elsewhere (like I did - reluctantly to object storage providers via many FOSS CLI tools; would have loved to keep paying for the old Dropbox). Hostile pricing was not the only concern; hostile UX, an insanely bloated app, and breaking features (because sure, those are not bugs) galore. Now the native file sync is a really doomed space for individual customers (because I have never explored what's out there exclusively for enterprise). Dropbox is well Dropbox New. Anyone in their right minds, or if anyone has a device other than an Apple device, will not even think of relying on the (even after years of complaints) opaque and buggy iCloud. Google Drive, while most reliable technically, is a really bad bet as a filesystem file sync tool; besides, they are much more bloated than Dropbox, and their suite offerings are intertwined with it so deep. Smaller offerings like Tresorit (though most "native" among its peers) are too buggy and have questionable practices like that of pCloud, etc. So while the entire personal/consumer filesystem file sync system has gone to the gutter now, Dropbox is still a bad solution among quite worse ones and that's really sad. From storing 100s of GBs at one point, I am back to just ~300 MB in Dropbox now. Just couldn't trust it anymore after it broke my workflows quite a few times and still keeps trying with that sudden pop-up of "Update Available" which is not really an app update (app updates silently in the bg; all hail Electron), that is actually a sly way to make you enable its folder on File Provider API feature. I am sure it is a good feature for many but for heaven's sake the very reason I started using (and still use Dropbox for) is because it syncs my complete files across systems. The lest you can do is not actively try to make me click on it. Besides I don't want any other bloody thing. Just give me that feature, and only that, and take my money and in a native app while we are at it. There are LLMs now, give us back a native app at least. Seeing the focus on "AI" I am pretty sure very soon I'll have to take even that ~300 MB elsewhere. PS. Their support is absolutely questionable. I've had a chance to contact them for some bugs. Goodness, it took literally weeks, and dozens of messages, to make them accept it's a bug and even then they didn't really accept they just stopped responding (so I assume they accepted it. Besides it was never fixed :D).

klik99 5mo ago

He finally realized that you could just rsync

hyfgfh 5mo ago

They had some great miss opportunities with Paper and easy storage, but it seems they stopped on the MVP stage

sporkland 5mo ago

I walked into the Mint one night because I liked to grab a bad cocktail and some good karaoke.. some guy got on stage and belted out a beautiful version of Rocket Man. I looked closed and it was Drew. Guy has pipes. Oh his software was pretty good too.

hieKVj2ECC 5mo ago

just here to say I love Dropbox since I ran Ubuntu long ago and Windows and Android. I am still on it and cant thank them enough

dbg31415 5mo ago

[dead]

ulfw 5mo ago

Used to be a (paid) dropbox customer for many years because frankly nothing beat dropbox on stability and performance for a long time. What killed them for me was: - idiotic pricing model. You either pay little for little storage or a lot for a lot. Like most people I needed more than a tiny bit and less than a shitton of storage and there was no offering for me - the idiotic decision to not support ARM Macs for a good year. That's what broke the camel's back and I decided to offload to other services only to realise it's not that important who you're with. It's a commodity product - which leads to the last point: Dropbox never found something innovative or interesting to set them apart. They tried a lot of random products, none appealed to me.

DuzAwe 5mo ago

I turned my back on Dropbox when they add a war criminal on the board. Dove headfirst into open source alts. Never really looked back.

simonebrunozzi 5mo ago
Are you talking about Condoleezza Rice ?
- pbiggar 5mo ago
  Definitely. Not to mention that their major investor, Sequoia, has been war profiteering and Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire has been publicly islamophobic and a huge supporter of the genocide and occupation in Palestine.

olliebrkr 5mo ago

I always really liked Dropbox, but after a while it just made more sense to consolidate and start using Proton Drive. Do I miss Dropbox? Sure, but I don't miss the extra payment.

sylens 5mo ago

I just checked my email and saw that my earliest use of Dropbox was with its 3rd alpha for Linux in August 2008. That is an awfully long time to be using a service. I remember how exciting it was when they released an Android client for my HTC Incredible to run

alexnewman 5mo ago

Man people who owned stock and sold calls when it went up killed it.

isodev 5mo ago

Oh I didn't know Dropox still exists.

khernandezrt 5mo ago

Never heard of a single bad thing about Dropbox. Used them since i can remember. Never had issues.